Jackass 3.5: For the love of painfully stupid

The earliest pre-Jackass stunt you’ll find Johnny Knoxville performing online is his experiment with self-defence weapons. A tentative group watches as Knoxville is doused in the face with pepper spray and shot with a stun gun — all at point-blank range. For his grand finale, Knoxville drives out to the middle of a desert and shoots himself in the abdomen with a Smith & Wesson to try his luck with a bulletproof vest.

That 1998 stunt was for the counter-culture skateboard magazine Big Brother, and marked the beginning of a modest, but profitable, revolution of trouble-making. Now, after the success of an MTV show, the Jackass movie series has a combined franchise box office total of US$355-million, including this past October’s Jackass 3D. But there’s more cringe-inducing pain where that came from.

To mark April Fool’s Day on Friday, the Web-based TV service joost.com is releasing Jackass 3.5, which features 85 minutes of unseen footage that proves Knoxville’s compatriots still have plenty of ways to injure themselves. (It also features interviews with cast members that detail the execution of the more brutal stunts.)

The opening scene features the most daring of the group, Steve-O, in his customary leopard thong as a snapping turtle bites into his behind. Steve-O (real name Stephen Gilchrist Glover, who was arrested in Calgary this past week due to charges stemming from an outstanding assault warrant) was recruited to Jackass through Big Brother editor Jeff Tremaine, who co-created, and eventually directed, the TV and movie series.

The original show debuted in 2000, but, despite its immense popularity, was shut down just two years later. U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman initially denounced Jackass, placing intense political pressure on MTV to tone it down. “I felt that we couldn’t do a watered-down version of the show, so I quit,” said Knoxville in an interview with Maxim magazine at the time.

But while Jackass’s lewd, reckless and just-plain-dumb moments may have seemed pointless at the time, they also encouraged a healthy bout of counter-culture entertainment that can be seen in such projects as Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat and Bruno, and the many avant-garde projects of director Spike Jonze, one of Jackass’s co-creators. That Knoxville and the Jackass cast refused to tone down their style despite guaranteed millions from MTV is a testament to how pure this movement was. The show’s cancellation made Jackass seem even more dangerous than it initially was.

When MTV Films was formed, the studio wanted to revive the controversial series. So they slapped on an R rating and released Jackass: The Movie. Since then, Knoxville and Co. have continued to come up with innovative ways of filming their stunts. In 3.5, Jonze and Tremaine talk about the use of 3-D and Phantom cameras (which capture super slow-motion at 1,000 frames per second) to emphasize the action.

No one is spared in 3.5: children, parents, grandparents are all at one point confronted with a stunt. But above all, the cast represents the possibility of creating a career out of doing what you love — even if what you love is terribly, painfully stupid.

Jackass 3.5 is available through Paramount Pictures on April 1 at joost.com.